When developing cloud native applications on OpenShift, developer may need to launch services (databases, messaging system,…​) that the application under development may need to connect to. The OpenShift tooling allowed to launch such services but it was based on the service catalog which is not available anymore on OpenShift 4.

The new feature is based on operators which is the devops way of installing and managing software on Kubernetes clusters. So when you want to launch a service for your application, you will have to choose from the list of installed operators on your cluster and then select type of deployment you want.

In the following example, there are two operators installed on our cluster: the Strimzi operator for setting up Kafka clusters on Kubernetes and a Postgresql operator.

For each operator, we can select the type of deployment we want to setup.

After you’ve entered the name of your service, it will appear in the application explorer view: